Towing in Ingleside, TX.

The San Patricio ring across the Harbor Bridge is heavy-duty country. Refineries, the LNG buildout, and the Steel Dynamics mill drive constant 18-wheeler and tanker traffic through Portland, Ingleside, Gregory, and Sinton. Heavy wreckers cover rigs and lowboys, plus boat-trailer recovery toward Aransas Pass.

Ingleside is the industrial waterfront of San Patricio County. The Enbridge Ingleside Energy Center on FM 1069 is the largest crude oil storage and export terminal by volume in the United States, it loaded its 500th VLCC in April 2024 and averaged 1.13 million barrels exported per day in 2025. Right next door sits the South Texas Gateway Terminal, the second-largest crude export facility in the country. These two terminals alone drive constant tanker-trailer, lowboy, vacuum truck, and pipeline support vehicle traffic on FM 1069 and SH-361 at every hour of the day and night. Flint Hills Resources operates an Ingleside crude terminal connected to its refinery system by a 24-mile pipeline. The former Naval Station Ingleside, which closed in 2010 after serving as the Navy's mine-warfare homeport since 1992, was converted to port and industrial land. That pier was sold to Flint Hills for $8.5 million; the rest went to Occidental Petroleum interests. The entire waterfront that once staged Navy mine sweepers now stages crude oil exports at an industrial scale that has no parallel on the Gulf Coast. SH-361 running east through Ingleside and out to the Port Aransas ferry causeway carries a second major traffic stream: beach-season visitors from Corpus Christi and beyond. On summer weekends the ferry queue backs traffic along SH-361 through Ingleside proper, sometimes for miles. Any stall on the narrow bridge structures between Ingleside and the ferry dock stops the only vehicle access to Port Aransas from the north, and recovering a disabled vehicle off a bridge span requires equipment and coordination. Ingleside on the Bay, the small bayfront neighborhood south of the main city, sits directly on Corpus Christi Bay with extreme salt-air exposure. Battery and undercarriage corrosion failures are accelerated here. Anglers launching at the bay ramp on SH-361 can also find themselves with a broken-down truck that can't pull a loaded boat trailer back up a steep concrete ramp. For any breakdown in the Ingleside terminal zone or along SH-361, call Quick Tow at (361) 967-8088.